Its so easy to squander time, not pay attention to what is going on, not fully appreciate the moments in our lives. The aim of expressive writing is to heighten our own awareness, to pay attention to what is going on, to be more fully present to our life.

In this short translated ted talk by Cristina Domenech, she gives a sense of how the prisoners with whom she meets in a long term poetry writing group, have awakened to the joy of expressing themselves, to see themselves more clearly through the poems they write. (one such poem is read here by one of the prisoners).

Evidence from longitudinal studies indicates that writing down your goals makes it much more likely that you will achieve them. But where and how do you write them?

For some time now I’ve been using virtual sticky notes as screen savers on my laptop for goals.

Big picture goals can be captured in a long range or medium term (maybe weeks or months) list of things you want to achieve. You might want to add an inspirational quote in another note to mirror the big picture goal. I’ve got one by the writer JD Salinger and its a constant reminder of the way I want to write. It’s a daily inspiration.

On a day to day basis we need to move from big picture thinking of where we want to get to how we’re going to get there and it can be very helpful to have living documents of daily or weekly goals. Using virtual sticky notes is a constant reminder of these goals.

I thought that after a while I’d sort of forget to do the notes or lose interest but instead I’ve grown to rely on this system as a way of achieving more focus in various work projects and in other tasks (I’ve got at least one sticky note too for non work stuff). So I use these notes as living documents to delete items, add items and review the lists themselves. I use different colours for daily , weekly and long term lists and also to differentiate work from non work lists. Leo Babauta’s blog, Zen Habits has inspired a Daily Practices list as well.

While the research links writing goals down to eventual success in terms of getting where you want to be, I think that it also helps to relieve the day to day stress of trying to remember what it is we have to do. So dumping everything on a list leaves us free to get on with things. Its all in one place and I don’t have to worry about remembering things. That shouldn’t be underestimated because if you’re a scatterbrain like me, it can take a lot of energy trying to keep track of everything.

There’s the constant visual reminder of your goals simply because, if its on your screen saver, you’re going to keep seeing these lists all the time.

Finally written goals give focus and purpose so you begin to see a pattern to the things you write down, what it is that you really consider to be important, what you want to give time to, what is worthwhile whether that’s a daily swim or a new work project.

What can I say? It works. Its a tracking system, a reminder system and a way of keeping focus. I like it a lot. In fact I’m addicted and along with gratitude writing (more of that again) its an integral part of my routine.

I open the truck’s door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was real craggy and stood like an island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I’ve looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave.

We all have places in our hearts, images of houses, landscapes, people. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature, Seamus Heaney recalled the house in which he grew up: “It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other….”

Try writing about a place you know well, somewhere that means a lot to you: perhaps a house you grew up in or a place you went on holidays. What was it like in early morning? Was it full of sunlight? Was it cold? What are the sounds you remember? What smells do you associate with this place? Try writing quickly without thinking too much for ten minutes.

But imagine if there was a place where nobody apportions blame, where we can simply be.

Rumi the 13^th century Persian poet described such a place with these words;

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

So imagine that you in that field.

Somebody is coming to join you. It may be someone with whom you have a history, some deep hurt. 

But here you both are in this beautiful field out beyond all ideas of right doing and wrongdoing.

What is it you would like to say to this person? What is their reply?

Try writing this conversation.

One way of looking at key influences in your life is to look at those moments when you knew that there was no going back. Something shifted and you were sure that life would not be the same.

Here’s the Oxford dictionary definition of the word game changer:

An event, idea, or procedure that effects a significant shift in the current way of doing or thinking about something.

Try thinking of times in your life when an event, idea or way of doing things really stopped you in your tracks and you decided to change your own way of doing something or thinking about something.

Maybe a book you read or an article or blog really struck you and you decided to try out the ideas for yourself. Or maybe you started working with someone whose whole approach made you reexamine your own way of doing things. 

What was the event, idea or way of doing things and what was so different about it?

What happened then and how did it all turn out for you?

Its easy to be absent rather than present in a relationship, cruising along on automatic pilot, so we’re not really there. ‘I’m still here and yet I’m gone.’

So if you’ve experienced that kind of drifting away, then what is it you might like to say to your partner or maybe to your child, to a parent or a friend? Try writing the words beginning with ‘I’m still here and what I’d like to say to you is…’

A beautiful version of Glenn Campbell singing the song ‘I’m not going to miss you’ can be seen on https://www.youtube.com.

The psychologist Ellen Langer talks about the importance of living with full attention and not mindlessly. Paying attention is about being open to noticing new things, even in situations which seem so familiar to us that we feel we already know them completely. We tend to operate on automatic pilot using assumptions that have served us well so far whether its about people or our environment or our way of doing things.

So, for example, I enjoy sea swimming and swim at a local beach usually at high tide. Its a big wide beach beside which is another smaller one I had always assumed to be too rocky for swimming. I thought I knew this smaller beach well and didn’t relish the idea of cutting myself on jagged rocks. What works for us we tend to repeat over and over so I wasn’t enthusiastic when a swimming friend suggested we try it but my assumptions proved to be all wrong.

The rocks in fact form a natural outdoor swimming pool at low tide which is beautiful to swim in. So the combination of my friend’s enthusiasm and happening to go there at low instead of high tide helped me discover an absolutely wonderful natural pool which you can see in the photo.

Noticing and being alert to new possibilities might help us discover, for example, lots of good places to swim. In fact recently on my ‘new’ beach I met someone who is in the process of writing a book about all the best beaches, rivers and lakes to swim in Ireland, documenting the myriad of possibilities open to us to enjoy.

Can you think of a time when you had your assumptions shaken, allowing you to see something or someone you thought you knew well in a new light? Try writing about what that was like. What did you learn to see differently? What difference has that made?

In the film Boyhood (2014)a group of four actors were filmed over twelve years by the filmmaker Richard Linklater, to capture the journey of the main character, Mason, from a small boy to his first day in college. It manages to record in a stunningly successful way all the little moments that shape the adult he ultimately becomes, how he reacts and adapts to the circumstances of his life over which, as a young child, he has very little control. Because it was filmed with the same group of actors over such a long time span, the film has a sense of poignancy as we watch through the boy’s eyes as he tries to adapt to house moves, new schools and the issues in his parent’s lives.

We all have home movie reels in our heads of events in our childhood and what we may recall as something of huge significance may not even be remembered by others in the family. Its all a matter of perspective. So why not look at one of your own childhood memories but instead of writing that memory as you remember it try writing about it from the point of view of someone else who was there at the time?

People who fish our local lake spend a lot of time standing on fishing platforms like this one. It demands a lot of patience, an ability to be still and silent, to slow down, waiting for that perfect moment, for the fish to bite.

Writing demands the same quality, an ability to be still, to day dream, to wait and let ideas surface.

Why not spend a little while just being still, letting your mind wander? Then after a time of stillness, try some free writing. Maybe write for twenty minutes, without over thinking or judging what you write. Pay no attention to grammar or spelling. This writing is just for you. Try writing long hand with pen and paper. Just keep writing. Cast your net wide and see what you capture.

This morning there was something about the quality of light on this path in the local woods that brought me back to walking country lanes during childhood summers spent on my Uncle’s farm. The empty grassy path, with only birdsong disturbing the silence, had the same feeling of nature untamed. Those long ago summer days seemed wild and untamed too with hours on end to explore and roam.

Wendell Berry describes so beautifully the soothing powers of wild natural environments in his poem The Peace of Wild Things:

‘When despair for the world grows in me…

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things.’

Describe a time in your life when you sought peace in the power of nature perhaps walking on a beach or lying under a favourite tree. Describe the place, what it means to you now or meant to you then. Where do you now go to rest in ‘the peace of wild things’?